Bringing the Tesseract to Life
After his debut album, FRACTALS, dropped in 2022 and explored the geometric concept of literal fractals, electronic DJ Subtronics most recently released TESSERACT. His latest album, tour, and stage/vessel for world-building, he captures the sounds of those unfathomable phenomena. His sonic portal? The tesseract—a hypercube concept wherein each side peels back and reveals another cube, identical yet infinitesimally different. The four-dimensional analog of a cube.
Larry Barcello of Brass City Productions Inc., and Production Manager for the tour points out, “I’d been aware of Jesse [Kardon; stage name Subtronics] for quite some time. He’s been pretty prolific over the past couple of years with a steady trajectory in his fan base. Roughly over a year ago is when I did my first show with him. Max Goessing, our Tour Director, is a longtime friend and colleague and is one of the principals at Center Stage Industries,” continues Barcello. “Conor Gray is our Tour Manager, and Elle Matthews is our Stage Manager. Specifically for this tour and in general with my touring team, I do have a core group of individuals that I turn to. I have Dave “Rigger Dave” Ardale, as our Head Rigger. I’ve been working with Dave for a good while. Our Video Crew Chief, Steven Calley, and I have been working together for over a decade. We’re putting this 67-point show up in roughly four hours and it’s coming down in approximately two.”
The Design Direction
For the production design Barcello reached out to Erik Mahowald of Bending Lite Productions. As a designer and LD, Mahowald worked for years with acts like Tiësto and Dillon Francis. “We really found our sweet spot in the dance music world,” Mahowald comments. Bending Lite had done several one-off productions of independent designs for specific rooms for Subtronics, which led to the invitation by Barcello to do an entire tour.
Mahowald says, “Larry, who’s a good friend of mine and someone I’ve built many rigs with over the past six or seven years called me up, saying he’d love to have us involved in this show and introduced me to the camp. They had made it pretty clear that they wanted something very special. They weren’t scared of doing something a little bit abstract, which is always music to my ears as a designer.”
Barcello points out, “Erik is our Creative Director and Lighting Designer. He was supposed to be the designer at first, but quickly became the guy with that global perspective of what Jesse [Subtronics] wanted and then implemented that into a cohesive visual with Spencer Michaels, our Lighting Director; and Jake Keenan, our Touring Video Engineer. I can’t say enough good things about Erik. I feel Erik is one of the best designers in the industry.”
Everybody was aware they didn’t want that typical wall of sensory overload common to EDM. “We wanted to create moments, with finesse,” continues Barcello. “That aesthetic was driven a lot from Jesse’s take on things as well. Don’t get me wrong, EDM thrives on that energetic frenzy. We set out to build a show that is a lot sexier, looks a lot more purposeful, that lends a more cohesive experience. And Jesse definitely has a story to tell here. He has some very clear and defined ideas. He has a direct influence on what he would like the show to look like. Jesse is very trusting in his design team and leaves the minutia or finer details up to them. This particular one, TESSERACT, he’s telling a very purposeful story line that has chapter markers.”
Layering the Screens
“I always look at what the artist has for assets internally to help outline the budget,” says Mahowald of his design process. “We knew going in content played such a special part in the show that we didn’t want to compromise that. Subtronics Art and Content Director Ray Elemento had a wealth of imagery for us to work with. So, a big upstage video wall was the start point.” Mahowald then asked Subtronics to give him some key words that were special to him. He threw back at Mahowald things like “cosmic, ethereal, dimensional, quantum. He spoke of a very dimensional design, darkness, lots of negative space. A lot of his content and reference photos exhibited single light source lasers and the dark film noir sense of shadows. In all our conversations he kept bringing up dimensionality.”
The designer started playing with dimensional rigs which would hang in front of the video wall, in the sight lines. “One of the issues I was having was finding a way to make it so the content would still play well in the shadow of the six squares. Which led me to the ROE Vanish 8T V2 tiles.”
Merging early Hollywood silent films with the latest video technology, the chapter markers are presented as graphic titles on the upstage LED screen. A succession of six, custom-fabricated squares by Gallagher Staging are hung in front of that screen. Ascending in size from 3×3 meters to 8×8 meters, these squares serve multiple platforms in the show, at times creating the ‘portal’ leading into the tesseract and other dimensions graphically exposed on the upstage LED screen. At other times Video Engineer Keenan sends content to them, evoking a three-dimensional aspect to the screen, illuminating a unique perspective.
The squares are hung from an overhead truss grid which nestles the rest of the lighting system. Attached to the façade of these squares are 132 Martin VDO Fatron 20’s. Keenan is the one who facilitates the content and implements it. He explains, “When I sat down with Ray [Elemento], I told him that I wanted to timecode as much as I could in the video; it allows the show to hit properly every single time. You know when things are going to react, you know when the video is going to come in, when it’s going to black out. And it leaves the ability for Spencer, our Lighting Director to let the lasers have their moments as well. That’s a big aspect of this: creating these moments for everyone. Jesse definitely allowed me to be creative, which I appreciate a lot.”
Mixing Lighting, Video, and Lasers
“Video does not have to be present every second of the show,” Keenan continues. “I’ve been doing this enough to know that doesn’t need to be the case; turning off video allows for black moments where lighting can shine, lasers can shine; it allows the other elements to breathe. And, you know, vice versa. Lasers come off and it’s just video and it allows the content to show and let the rest of the lights and lasers breathe. I think playing off each other that way allows people’s eyes to adjust and relax. Both Larry and Jesse were after those created moments. They’re like, ‘let’s just let this ride and let lights go dark and the visuals play.”
Keenan runs everything in Resolume. Instead of having clips he’s created a timeline-based show. The squares introduce the audience into the different universes and into the Tesseract world, so to speak. “With Resolume there’s this cool thing in Resident Fixture Editor where you can add light fixtures to Resolume instead of just a video wall. That way you can pixel map content to fixtures. I talked to Spencer before we got into pre-viz and the workflow—that I’ve done in the past—is I’ll make a pixel map, basically create the squares themselves in Resolume and then send him all that DMX data. Then he can control when it goes to the squares, and I have control; or when he has control and was able to just set that up in his cue stacks. I have the ability to send what is happening on the video wall to the squares themselves.”
Previz and Programming
Mahowald, Keenan and Michaels spent 10 days of pre-viz at the Bending Lite Studio in Denver. After which, Mahowald continued onto rehearsals for seven days at the Armory in Minneapolis, which is also where the first show was. “I do 30 or more large scale festival designs a year, and more often than not EDM demands bright, full-on 600 lights moving all the time,” describes Mahowald. “With the TESSERACT Tour I pushed the programmers to go to the dark side. Use the negative space. This helped isolate and create the moments Jesse wanted.”
Mahowald continues, “Spencer is a great programmer and has a very unique way of timecoding his shows. He wanted to move over to the MA3 for this tour, which was great because his programming on the MA3 is incredible. Also, the board has a really fantastic workflow. You know, from my perspective of being a designer, he was a very fast programmer. He was very, very efficient in how he used his system. And of course, when I get to work with someone like Spencer and Jake, it was terrific. Both were really easy to work with.”
Lighting Director Michaels had been working with Subtronics since the FRACTAL Tour in 2022 and was excited to collaborate when the design duties were offered to Mahowald.
“After working with Erik, I realized how much fun it is to work with him, how talented he is, and what an amazing designer he is. He brings the design to life and gives me an amazing playground to work in and do what I love doing, which is programming. I got to spend all my energy and efforts in the programming side rather than splitting my efforts trying to design, program it, and run it.”
Key Equipment Choices
“Jesse has full trust in myself and Jake and the Visual Team,” Michaels continues. “Specifically with lighting and lasers he has a lot of trust in me. I’m a big fan of hybrid fixtures. Something that has a tight beam and a big gobo wash, all in the same fixture. We’re using the Martin Axiom as our hybrid fixture. For the strobe, we’re using the [GLP] JDC1. It’s a classic workhorse. We use it in the 68-channel mode, so we have the full flexibility with individual pixels and big strobe hits. We use the Robe Forte as a key light, which is great because I can shutter in a nice sculpted look on Jesse. Then we have some [TMB] Solaris Flares under the platform grate to underlight him.”
In terms of SFX, there are six flame units that get used quite a bit during the show. “We always get quite a fun reaction from the crowd with those!” laughs Michaels. “We have Elle Matthews, our stage manager, either calling or operating the SFX console. I have DMX control of the smoke and haze machines. I’m constantly riding the levels to make sure that we’re not smoking up the video wall. The lasers still look impactful. The lighting still looks impactful. I would just like to say how pleasant it has been to work with these very talented folks; all the same mindset, all trying to do their best to get the show looking its best. And again, working with Jesse is always a pleasure.”
Vendor and Crew Support
Barcello turned to LMG to provide full production for the TESSERACT Tour. “Their reputation, staff, and they have a rehearsal space in Vegas where we could hang the production made them the obvious choice,” Barcello notes. “The fact LMG has a rehearsal studio at that depot was of immense help.”
“You know, you would think just building some squares is pretty simple,” laughs Barcello. “It’s really not at all, considering the fact that we have to attach these very specific fixtures that have very specific connection points. The [Martin] Fatron comes in 1m and 2m sections. We had to methodically and specifically fabricate these two-inch square pieces to avoid any potential rolling on those fixtures as you’re building it and flying it out. We have roughly (300) 2” squares, so Gallagher provided clamps that we use instead of the Fatron accessories. Jimmy Russo and the Gallagher guys did a good job,” continues Barcello. “We were operating on a tight timeline and it all kind of worked out because Gallagher now has a fabrication shop based out of Las Vegas and that’s where LMG pulled the show.”
Barcello also states, “I really can’t express enough praise for our road crew. Our video crew does the job of four people. The wall is 55’ wide and 34’ tall. We’ve built this in as little as 26 minutes, and the fastest that we’ve broken it down is 14 minutes. Our touring crew are all absolute beasts as well as some of the nicest and most genuine people in the world. Our camp is really big on treating everyone with respect and dignity, from the stagehands we work with on a daily basis to the local venue staff that help us organize living on the road. We’re all stagehands when you get down to it; that’s how most of us started in this business.”
Mahowald concludes, “It was a challenging build. It is really awesome when you nail it. This one was one of those ones where it really just came together, and the concept translated into the real world very, very well.”
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A VENDOR VIEW with LMG
LMG was the lighting and video vendor for the Subtronics Tesseract Tour 2024, with Kevin Mass, and Max Tuchman as the LMG technical project managers supporting the production. LMG Account Exec Karol Luczkiewicz discussed with PLSN why LMG are uniquely positioned to be the vendor for Subtronics.
“LMG is a full service production company; one stop shopping at its best, and for Subtronics we provided a 360⁰ solution. Media servers, LED wall, lighting, rigging, and audio were prepped and launched from our Las Vegas facility,” says Luczkiewicz.
Implementing the design of six, square outlined structures was the first hurdle in pulling the show together. The centerpiece of the show, designer Erik Mahowald of bendinglite had come up with the concept. “Erik, the lighting/ production designer, had specced these six custom square frames ranging from 3 meters square to 8 meters square. There’s a lot of three-dimensional content that is deployed on this show,” continues Luczkiewicz.
Positioned from the downstage edge to just in front of the upstage LED wall, which is comprised of 153 ROE Visual Vanish panels, they hung from an overhead truss grid that nestled the rest of the lighting system. Attached to the façade of each square via custom cheeseboroughs were 132 Martin VDO Fatron 20’s that are able to process and display the video content as well as provide illumination.
“We partnered with Gallagher Staging in the fabrication process of bringing these video squares to life,” adds Luczkiewicz. “They also play a huge part in the story arc Subtronics creates as he brings the audience through portals into the tesseract.”
LMG had had worked with production manager Larry Barcello last year when he was the Tour Director for DJ Duo Two Friends on a small club/amphitheater summer tour in 2023. He used LMG again for lighting and video on a one off event for Subtronics in Vegas at the end of 2023. This laid the groundwork for Barcello again reaching out- this time for the entire production package.
“I think,” continues Luczkiewicz, “Larry was well aware of our extensive technical support team for providing successful support on those previous projects. That and the fact they were looking to deploy some highly customized structure led him to turn to us for solutions on this tour. Kevin Mass and Max Tuchman, our technical project managers for the tour did a lot of work helping deal with any issues that came up with networking and resolving any rigging issues. Kevin was the key player and the key drafter for all of the rigging, production overlays, and all the Vectorworks drawings. Max went on to rehearsals onsite to provide immediate support if needed,” Luczkiewicz says.
LMG Touring provided the Audio lead and systems engineer. The rest were from Barcellos staff. “I think our ability to have experienced knowledgeable people onsite during rehearsals; is a major factor as to why LMG is successful,” notes Luczkiewicz. I also believe space was the biggest key player in our selection as the vendor. We were able to hang the entire rig , including the LED wall and the custom squares in our Vegas facility so it was “show ready” when it went in the truck heading for rehearsal at the Armory in Minneapolis. Another factor in our favor is we are a one stop, full production shop. That means one phone call to one person; me. They’re not hunting down different people for an answer. I’m the one source of contact and I in turn do the legwork to solve any issues. That facilitates a very streamlined system.”
Once the tour is out the door, LMG maintains a constant flow of checking in on the tour. “I check in with Larry every few days after every couple shows just to kind of see if they need a care package if they’re doing OK out there,” says
I’m very impressed with Larry . It was a big relief to have someone as organized and as thorough as Larry is. All too often we don’t hear a word until a week or so before something goes out the door. Larry was on top of this all the way . The crew he has out there are equally as efficient. He has assembled a very diligent, very strong, and experienced production crew,” concludes Luczkiewicz.
Click here to see the gear and crew list for the Subtronics Tesseract Tour
